martes, noviembre 18, 2014

Pavlov (operating on a dog in 1902) ran his lab like a factory; dogs were his machines.Credit Courtesy Wellcome Library, London

As
a college student, B. F. Skinner gave little thought to psychology. He
had hoped to become a novelist, and majored in English. Then, in 1927,
when he was twenty-three, he read an essay by H. G. Wells about the
Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. The piece, which appeared in the Times Magazine,
was ostensibly a review of the English translation of Pavlov’s
“Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of
the Cerebral Cortex.” But, as Wells pointed out, it was “not an easy
book to read,” and he didn’t spend much time on it. Instead, Wells
described Pavlov, whose systematic approach to physiology had
revolutionized the study of medicine, as “a star which lights the world,
shining down a vista hitherto unexplored.”

That
unexplored world was the mechanics of the human brain. Pavlov had
noticed, in his research on the digestive system of dogs, that they
drooled as soon as they saw the white lab coats of the people who fed
them. They didn’t need to see, let alone taste, the food in order to
react physically. Dogs naturally drooled when fed: that was, in Pavlov’s
terms, an “unconditional” reflex. When they drooled in response to a
sight or sound that was associated with food by mere happenstance, a
“conditional reflex” (to a “conditional stimulus”) had been created.
Pavlov had formulated a basic psychological principle—one that also
applied to human beings—and discovered an objective way to measure how
it worked.

Skinner was enthralled. Two years after reading the TimesMagazine
piece, he attended a lecture that Pavlov delivered at Harvard and
obtained a signed picture, which adorned his office wall for the rest of
his life. Skinner and other behaviorists often spoke of their debt to
Pavlov, particularly to his view that free will was an illusion, and
that the study of human behavior could be reduced to the analysis of
observable, quantifiable events and actions.

But
Pavlov never held such views, according to “Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life
in Science” (Oxford), an exhaustive new biography by Daniel P. Todes, a
professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins School of
Medicine. In fact, much of what we thought we knew about Pavlov has been
based on bad translations and basic misconceptions. That begins with
the popular image of a dog slavering at the ringing of a bell. Pavlov
“never trained a dog to salivate to the sound of a bell,” Todes writes.
“Indeed, the iconic bell would have proven totally useless to his real
goal, which required precise control over the quality and duration of
stimuli (he most frequently employed a metronome, a harmonium, a buzzer,
and electric shock).”

Pavlov is perhaps best
known for introducing the idea of the conditioned reflex, although Todes
notes that he never used that term. It was a bad translation of the
Russian uslovnyi, or “conditional,” reflex. For Pavlov, the
emphasis fell on the contingent, provisional nature of the
association—which enlisted other reflexes he believed to be natural and
unvarying. Drawing upon the brain science of the day, Pavlov understood
conditional reflexes to involve a connection between a point in the
brain’s subcortex, which supported instincts, and a point in its cortex,
where associations were built. Such conjectures about brain circuitry
were anathema to the behaviorists, who were inclined to view the mind as
a black box. Nothing mattered, in their view, that could not be
observed and measured. Pavlov never subscribed to that theory, or shared
their disregard for subjective experience. He considered human
psychology to be “one of the last secrets of life,” and hoped that
rigorous scientific inquiry could illuminate “the mechanism and vital
meaning of that which most occupied Man—our consciousness and its
torments.” Of course, the inquiry had to start somewhere. Pavlov
believed that it started with data, and he found that data in the saliva
of dogs.

Pavlov’s research originally had
little to do with psychology; it focussed on the ways in which eating
excited salivary, gastric, and pancreatic secretions. To do that, he
developed a system of “sham” feeding. Pavlov would remove a dog’s
esophagus and create an opening, a fistula, in the animal’s throat, so
that, no matter how much the dog ate, the food would fall out and never
make it to the stomach. By creating additional fistulas along the
digestive system and collecting the various secretions, he could measure
their quantity and chemical properties in great detail. That research
won him the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. But a dog’s
drool turned out to be even more meaningful than he had first imagined:
it pointed to a new way to study the mind, learning, and human behavior.

sábado, noviembre 08, 2014

In this Nov. 11, 1989, photo, East German border guards are seen through
a gap in the Berlin wall after demonstrators pulled down a segment of
it at Brandenburg gate. (LIONEL CIRONNEAU/Associated Press)

Documents show accident and contingency, anxiety in world capitals

East German crowds led the way, with help from Communist fumbles,
self-fulfilling TV coverage, Hungarian reformers, Czechoslovak
pressure, and Gorbachev's non-violence

Washington, DC, November 9, 2014 –The
iconic fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago today shocked international
leaders from Washington to Moscow, London to Warsaw, as East German
crowds
took advantage of Communist Party fumbles to break down the Cold War's
most symbolic barrier, according to formerly secret documents from
Soviet, German,
U.S., Czechoslovak and Hungarian files posted today by the National
Security Archive at George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org).

The historic events of the night of November 9, 1989 came about from
accident and contingency, rather than conspiracy or strategy, according
to the
documents. Crowds of East Berliners, already conditioned by months of
refugee flights to the West and weeks of peaceful mass protests in
cities like
Leipzig, seized on media reports of immediate changes in travel
restrictions — based on a bumbled briefing by a Politburo member, Gunter
Schabowski — and
inundated the Wall's checkpoints demanding passage. Television
coverage of the first crossing that yielded to the self-fulfilling media
prophecy then
created a multiplier effect and more crowds came, ultimately to dance
on the Wall.

The documents show that the actual collapse of the Wall began with
Hungarian Communist reformers who proposed in early 1989 to open their
borders to the
West, while seeking particularly West German foreign investment to
solve Hungary's economic crisis. Hungarian Communist leaders checked in
with Soviet
general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in March 1989, letting him know
they planned to take down the barbed wire; and Gorbachev — true to his
"common European
home" rhetoric — responded only that "we have a strict regime on our
borders, but we are also becoming more open." (Document 1) The Hungarian decision sparked a stream
and then a flood of East German refugees.

Abandoned East German Trabants
line the streets of Prague.

Gorbachev himself unintentionally gave a signal that the Wall could
fall in his press conference on June 15, 1989 after a successful visit
to West Germany,
where in response to a question about the Wall, he said that "nothing
[was] permanent under the Moon" and connected German rapprochement to
the building of
the common European home. In fact, his conversations with Kohl and
other members of the West German government created a real breakthrough
in Soviet-FRG
relations, which would stand Kohl in good stead in the difficult
reunification talks during the next year (Document 2).
Gorbachev especially reinforced the theme of
European unity in his speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg
where he presented his vision of the common European home on July 7,
1989. After
speaking about an essentially united Europe based on universal human
values, it would be hard to argue in favor of its continued division.

By August 1989, the Hungarian-initiated refugee crisis had become so
acute that the West German embassy in Budapest had to shut down, unable
to handle the
hundreds of East Germans camped out there for visas. On August 19,
Hungarian reformers even hosted a "Pan-European picnic" near the
Austrian border, after
which some 300 East Germans high-tailed across the former Iron Curtain.
The subsequent negotiations on August 25, 1989 between Hungarian
Communist leaders
with West German chancellor Helmut Kohl and foreign minister
Hans-Dietrich Genscher show the Hungarian calculation that only the
deutschmark could save
them, and by mid-September the Hungarians lifted all East-West controls
(Document 3).

East German demonstrators take to the streets in Leipzig, October 9, 1989.

Other world leaders were not at all eager for the Wall to fall, notably
the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who told Gorbachev on
September 23 to
ignore those NATO communiqués about German unification, that even her
buddy, U.S. president George H. W. Bush opposed that kind of change (she
would
be wrong, when the time came. See document 4).
As Gorbachev later commented to his Politburo on November 3, the West
did not want German unification, but it wanted to prevent it "with our
hands, to push us against the FRG" so as to head off any future
Soviet-German cooperation — but Gorbachev believed European integration
was
the ultimate solution to Soviet economic problems (Document 6).

Czechoslovakia was closer to East Germany than Hungary was, and after
Hungary opened its gates, Prague quickly filled with East Germans
willing to dump
their Trabant cars in the streets for a chance to clamber over an
embassy wall and flee to the West. By November 8, Prague had become so
choked with East
Germans that the hard-line Czechoslovak Communist Party's Central
Committee made a demarche to East Berlin demanding they open their
borders — a moment of
pressure from fellow Communists that played a key role in the East
German party's decision to announce revised travel regulations the next
day (Document 7).

The draft regulations were full of temporizing language and largely
intended to let off steam while kicking the emigrant problem down the
road. East
Germans would have to apply for visas, and the vast majority who
lacked passports would have to wait even longer for those. But the
presentation of the new
regulations came at the very end of a botched press conference from 6
to 7 p.m. Berlin time on November 9
by SED Politburo member Gunter Schabowski, who did not know the
back story, the hedges, the limitations meant by the drafters of the
documents. Visibly rattled from the shouted questions about travel and
the Wall,
Schabowski read from his briefing papers the words "immediately,
without delay" when asked about the timing of the changes that would
allow any East German
to emigrate (Document 9).

Television news and the wire services as well promptly announced the
opening of the borders, and in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy
reinforced by TV
coverage, crowds of East Germans massed at the border crossings and
ultimately persuaded the senior official at the largest inner-city
checkpoint at
Bornholmer Strasse to open the gates (a story told in fresh detail by
Mary Elise Sarotte in her new book, The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall).
Once Bornholmer opened, other crossings soon followed; and within
hours, people were
chipping off souvenir fragments from the concrete panels formerly
surrounded by a "death strip" in which earlier Wall jumpers had died.

So unexpected was the Wall opening that Helmut Kohl himself was not
even in the country. Instead, the West German chancellor had gone to
Warsaw to meet the
new Solidarity leaders of that country, and work out some long-standing
Polish-German tensions. The transcript of Kohl's discussions with Lech
Walesa show
the Polish leader complaining that events in East Germany were simply
moving too fast, and even predicting, presciently, that the Wall would
fall in a week
or two — at which point Kohl would have no time (or money) for poor
Poland (Document 8).

In Washington, the George H. W. Bush White House greeted the fall of
the Wall not with joy or triumphalism (that would come much later, when
the President
was running for re-election in 1992), but anxiety and even fear about
instability. When questioned by reporters why he did not show more
elation, President
Bush replied, "I am not an emotional kind of guy." (Document 10)

Bush's caution and prudence were appreciated in Moscow, where
Gorbachev's messages to Kohl centered on preventing chaos and reducing
instability, keeping
"others within limits that are adequate for the time being…." (Document 11)

But at Gorbachev's side, his foreign policy adviser Anatoly Chernyaev
in private let loose with one of the very few high-level expressions of
real joy
about the fall of the Berlin Wall. Chernyaev's diary entry for November
10, 1989 (Document 12) contains the coda for the demise of the Iron Curtain, "the end of Yalta" and the
Stalinist system, and a good thing, about time, in Chernyaev's remarkable view.

Russian President Vladimir Putin claims he does not want to put back
together the USSR, but the little things he does says otherwise.

But regional lawmakers decided last year to use the historic
name in some city statements related to the war, angering many in
Russia, where Stalin's name and legacy continues to cause fiery
disputes.
Putin made the statement Friday during a meeting with Russian war
veterans in Normandy, France, where he attended D-Day commemorations.
Responding to a veteran's suggestion to restore the name of Stalingrad, Putin said it could be decided by a public vote.

This is not a surprise, though. In January 2013, the Volgograd city council
said that for six days in a year the city will be known as Stalingrad.
One of the days is February 2, which was the last day of the historic
and bloody Battle of Stalingrad. This battle is the reason why the city
is so important to Russia. The Russians fought the Nazis from August 23,
1942 to February 2, 1943 at Stalingrad and was the turning point on the
Eastern Front. The German 6th Army was destroyed and the Axis started
to retreat from the East. A total of 1.7-2 million on both sides,
including civilians, were killed.

Yet, it could be renamed for other reasons. Putin said the fall of
the USSR was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. He
was a top KGB man in St. Petersburg before he moved to Moscow. During
his first presidency and when he was prime minister, he bullied
ex-Soviet states in order to dissuade them from forming closer ties to
the West and Europe. In 2008, Russia and Georgia engaged in a war over South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It did not last long, but it is one of the reasons why Georgia wants to join NATO.

“The main objective of Russia is to regain its sphere of influence over the post-Soviet states,” he said.
“After violating international law, after invading and occupying
territories of European nations and violating the basic principles and
consensuses of the post-Cold War order, Moscow has not paid any
political price.”

Moscow implemented a new law that accelerates the citizenship process
for any ethnic Russian or Russian speakers from another country. They
also passed a law that allows them to intervene in a country they feel are mistreating any ethnic Russians or Russian speakers.

jueves, mayo 15, 2014

Vladimir
Putin has described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest
catastrophe of the 20th Century. Western leaders have been quick to
brand this as old-fashioned thinking.

Their condescension sounds eerily like Neville Chamberlain’s remark that Hitler “missed the bus” in the Czech crisis.

The
“bus” the Russians have missed is not failure to accept the breakup of
the Soviet Empire. Rather, the great “catastrophe” of the 20th Century
was its very existence. Behind this difference lies the amnesia that
enables President Putin’s adventurism in the Ukraine and his
determination to put the wheels back on a malevolent and lethal machine.

In
1989, the entire world witnessed the defeat of the Soviet Union across
every front: ideology, economics, technology, and moral philosophy. This
purported “catastrophe” freed enslaved satellite states from the terror
and autocracy exported by the Bolsheviks across Eastern Europe.

Initially
the Russian people joined with central and eastern Europeans in
shedding the corporeal and spiritual chains of totalitarianism. But the
moment proved fleeting when the Russians looked into the abyss and
recoiled.

Russians
now refer to their entire history from 1917 through 1989 as “Soviet
Times.” Not Communist Era or the Reign of the Bolsheviks. Not the Red
Terror or the Evil Empire. They instead adopted an anodyne phrase that
has the ring of a Californian’s recollection of forbears who came from
“somewhere back east.”

“Soviet
Times” are comfortably moored far away from anyone’s experience or
understanding, like a mysterious civilization that melted into the
Siberian forests, leaving behind no people, artifacts, or runes. The
disastrous policies and practices, the systematized cruelties, the
twisted logic, and the murderous paranoia are lodged in some other
universe of the mind, providing no leaven for thought or opinion, and
certainly no instinct to examine with skepticism the leadership of
Russia Redux.

Leningrad
has reverted back to St. Petersburg to get the stink off of its name.
Yet Lenin’s corpse still molders on display in Red Square. The Communist
Party is now a maligned splinter group, but Putin’s United Russia Party
is led by the nomenklatura of the old CPSU.
Artwork confiscated by the Bolsheviks is still hanging in the Winter
Palace innocuously labeled “from the collection of” the victim, while
masterpieces looted in World War II are proudly displayed as glorious
battle trophies. GUM department store in Red Square is now a luxury mall
that would make a Kardashian blush, but the missile parade and
goosestepping still headline the May Day parade.

One
looks in vain for Russian literature or journalism exposing the
predations of the Communist regime during “Soviet Times.” There is no
scholarship that draws lessons from the “success” of the Comintern and
Stalin in infiltrating and purging foreign political parties,
particularly Social Democrats and other home-grown leftists. There is no
accounting of how many of the much vaunted 20 million Soviet dead in
the “Great Patriotic War” fell at the hands of grossly incompetent
generals, “state security organs,” well-armed commissars, and willfully
blind apparatchiks.

Asked
what it was like to live under surveillance by the KGB during Soviet
Times, Russians will insist that they personally had never been
troubled. They have no stories about how the security system co-opted
them to report on the “antisocial” activities and thoughts of
schoolmates, coworkers, and neighbors. None of them was a member of the
Communist Party; none spent youthful days in Komsomol or the Young
Pioneers. No one in their families disappeared into the gulags, and no
schoolmates died of head shots in the basement of the Lubyanka -- much
less prepared transportation manifeststo the Kamchatka death camps,
conducted midnight interrogations, or pulled the triggers on antisocial
elements.

If this degree of denial seems implausible, consider this item from ITAR/Izvestia.
On April 30, as Russia was digesting the Crimea and roiling Ukraine, a
deputy foreign minister denounced Western sanctions as “a revival of a
system created in 1949 when Western countries essentially lowered an
'Iron Curtain', cutting off supplies of high-tech goods to the USSR and
other countries."

So that’s what Winston Churchill was referring to in his Westminster College speech.

Such
obliviousness to the postwar grab of Eastern Europe by the Red Army
staggers the imagination. Yet it illuminates Russians’ persistence in
denying and rewriting their history. It is the same attitude that is
reflected in internal polls showing Russians are fervently behind the
new aggressiveness of Putin’s regime. They have easily fallen back into
the hands of the same bloodthirsty revanchists who ran the system in
Soviet Times; indeed, they treat with indifference the ascendancy of a
man whose entire career from KGB High School on is the embodiment of the
very secrecy, paranoia, and megalomania that oiled the USSR.

So
long as Russians remain in denial of their antecedents they will be a
belligerent and dangerous force in the world. It will be equivalent to
what would have unfolded if the Allies had not insisted on
“de-Nazification” of postwar Germany. Germans were not allowed to
rebrand and reinstall the Gauleiters, SS commanders, Gestapo thugs, and
Nazi party hacks as leaders of the new republic. Sixty years on, Germans
are still called to account for newly discovered instances of Nazi
cruelty and kleptomania and the shameful collaboration of
industrialists, professors, jurists, politicians, and civil servants.

Japan
has faced the same reminders of its past wickedness. Like Germany, it
has admirably restored itself and its people to the community of
nations, but the reminders still come of their brutality in World War
II. Efforts to attribute it to long-dead fanatics invariably fall on
deaf ears.

South
Africa implemented Truth and Reconciliation procedures to bring to the
surface the policies and programs of apartheid and racism. The reborn
republic defied expectations of a reign of terror by insisting that
reconciliation and the integrity of the process be paramount.

When
the USSR disintegrated, the Eastern European nations aggressively
confronted their Communist past. East Germans literally seized access to
the notorious Stasi files, where ordinary citizens read what their
government had done to them and who among them regularly reported on
“suspicious” activities of friends and colleagues. Similar stories
played out in all the Baltic and Central European States. These painful
experiences sharply lessen fears of the people returning to the bad old
days or the bad old actors.

By
contrast, the Russian people today may be fairly compared with Germans
after the “Great War.” They were never forced to confront the
implications of their very culture losing a titanic clash with the
democracies. A generation later, Germany was back on the path to world
war. So too the restored states of the Confederacy refused to examine
the social constructs that had created and fostered the evils of
slavery, the planter aristocracy, and the Civil War. The South truly
“rose again,” but in the hands of the same malevolent forces of racism
and resentment.

The
“catastrophe”of 1989 was the failure of the Russian people to confront
Soviet Times for what they were and to identifythe evil forces that they
spawned.The ongoing crisis in Europe will not abate unless and until
they remedy this failure

sábado, febrero 15, 2014

CNN.com's latest angle on the Sochi Olympics
is what could have been a fascinating story about Joseph Stalin and his
summer home. Instead what we have is an unbelievably sloppy piece of
"journalism."

Built in that city in 1937, twenty years after the October
revolution, the murderous dictator's dacha is now a tourist attraction
in Sochi. For the uninformed, though, CNN presents "Uncle Joe" as a
"notorious dictator," but also a loving family man who did remarkably
good things for social justice:

"No doubt that when our leader began to visit Sochi, the city
benefited from great development," [tour guide Anna] Hovantseva says.
"Earlier our city was the resort for the nobility, for only rich
people. There had been tourists' villas long before Stalin came here.
"But when Stalin began to visit Sochi, he began to develop it as a
resort town for all people. Thanks to him, a lot of sanatoriums and
hydropathic establishments (and) a road to Matsesta were built. All in
all, he did really much for the development of Sochi."

CNN tells us the reclusive "Uncle Joe" -- a man of simple pleasures
-- needed the dacha to replenish himself after a tough day of "ruling
over 200 million people":

Nestled in the coniferous, cypress-tree forest of the Matsesta
mineral springs area and perched in the foothills of the Caucasus
Mountains, it was seen as the ideal refuge to replenish the man whose
day job was ruling over 200 million people. …
"Generally, he liked to be all alone. He loved his wife Svetlana and
his children. He had no friends. He read and thought a lot. He enjoyed
hunting. He also loved farming. He grew lemons (for medicinal drinks).
So he was an unsociable man, I think."

Stalin might have loved his wife (CNN, the tour guide, or both are
incorrect: the wife was named Nadya - Sveltlana was the daughter) but he
also serially cheated on her, even with her friends. Nadya shot herself
dead in 1932 after a dinner party where he humiliated her in front of
another woman.

And Stalin didn't love all his children. He couldn't stand his eldest
son from his first marriage or the reprobate son he had with Nadya.
Stalin was devoted to his daughter Svetlana … until she betrayed him by
falling in love. Stalin had his daughter's first love arrested and
banished for ten years to an industrial town near the Arctic Circle
where he was likely a slave to The State.

Hitler built the autobahn and Stalin developed Sochi into a "resort
town for all people." But in order to complete his oh-so lofty socialist
goals, such as resort towns for "all people," Stalin starved, murdered,
and personally called for the executions of millions of "all people,"
and not just the upper class intellectuals, industrialists, and wealthy
landowners. Millions of peasants were starved to death; their grain
stolen to feed the cities and industrialize the "Motherland."

The day Stalin died in 1953 was the same day millions of Jews were
scheduled to be shipped Nazi-style out of their homelands and into the
Soviet death camps known as Gulags.

CNN points out that the portraits of Stalin found everywhere in the
dacha were only hung after his death. "[S]uch was his dislike of them,"
CNN adds.

Actually, no. In fact, the complete opposite is true. Stalin
commissioned untold numbers of portraits and statues of himself and
peppered them throughout the country he terrorized for 25 years.
Stalin's likeness was everywhere: streets, homes, businesses,
streetcars…. This was how he built a death cult to himself and became
Russia's god after destroying thousands of Christian churches and
synagogues.

The biggest factual error in this report is that Stalin didn't
socialize. All his life, Stalin socialized and took his toadies home
after work for dinner, movies, and drinks. Stalin used this "honor" to
terrorize the ideologically-pure sociopaths who made up his inner
circle. You were either forced to attend (until around 4 a.m.) or frozen
out -- which generally meant you could expect to be shot.

While married to Nadya, the Stalin's Kremlin apartment was a regular
compound for friends and children. It was only later after the Purge
and the Terror that Stalin traded in his friends for sycophants. This
is what happens when you personally have all but a few friends (and
their wives and children) murdered. But only after they were forced to
star in show trials and publicly confess to crimes they had not
committed (though these gangsters were guilty of almost everything
else).

Stalin might have grown lemons and watched Chaplin movies at his
Sochi dacha, but mostly he used it as a place to plan crimes against
humanity in the last century rivaled only by Hitler. Can you imagine CNN
writing something like this about Hitler? It's different with Stalin,
though, because he was ideologically-correct -- you know, not all bad.

One thing Stalin always counted on to spread The Revolution was the
"blind kittens" in the left-wing Western media sympathetic to his cause
and easily flattered and fooled into covering him favorably.

viernes, enero 17, 2014

In 1936, fearing persecution from Joseph Stalin's Soviet Russia, the Lykov family cut themselves off from Russian society. They were Old Believers, and thus part of a fundamentalist Russian Orthodox sect that was facing intense persecution from Russia's atheist Bolshevik government in Moscow. The family's patriarch, Karp Lykov, had seen his own brother shot by Communist troops, and decided it was better for his family to escape into the harsh Siberian wilderness.

The family lived in complete isolation, barely knowledgeable of the outside world, for decades. Now there's only one surviving member — a 70-year-old named Agafia who's facing a harsh winter by herself, according to a heartbreaking article in the Siberian Times today.

"I don't know how God will help me survive the winter," she said in a letter to a local newspaper, which was cited by the Siberian Times. "There aren't any logs. I need to get them into the house, and I need to keep reading my prayers. I'm suffocating, and I am getting too cold while doing it when the weather is freezing."

It was only in 1978 that the wider world heard of the Lykov story, when, by chance, a helicopter carrying Soviet geologists looking for a spot to land, discovered the family's base camp, 150 miles away from the nearest known settlement.

Since then, the Lykov family has become something of a legend. They were the family who never learned of World War II; paid no taxes and knew no laws; read only prayer books and an ancient bible; and sustained themselves in one of the world's harshest environments with no outside help and no technology. The discovery of their story was itself tragic, however — three of Karp's eldest children died within weeks of each other shortly after the geologists visited. It's widely believed they died from pneumonia caused by the outsiders' visit.

Last year the incredible story of the Lykovs was brought renewed attention after an article from Mike Dash of Smithsonian Magazine in January. A few months later, Vice Magazine went to the deepest parts of the Siberian taiga to visit the family's last remaining member, Agafia, who was born into the family in 1944 and never knew the outside world. She had lived alone for decades, and told Vice how her only regular contact with the outside world was a radio she now owned.

“I listen to the news about crime and explosions,” Agafia told them. “It’s scary. What’s wrong with [those] people who make suicidal public explosions?”

While Agafia's story made a big splash last year, the media cycle moves on, and the attention was fleeting until today's story in the Siberian Times.

"I am all alone, my years are big, my health is bad, I keep getting ill," Agafia said in the letter cited by the newspaper. "There is a lump on my right breast, and my strength is going. There is a need for a person, a helper, assuming there are kind people in the world, as the world has always had kind people."

The thought of the elderly Agafia facing such a harsh winter is tough. But not all locals are sympathetic — she has been offered a winter home in a local village before, the Siberian Times reports, but has refused it.

"She is being a little cunning," Vladimir Pavlovsky, editor of the local paper Krasnoyarskiy Rabochiy, told the Siberian Times. "She has no hunger. She wants to attract more attention. She has enough cereals, bags of them lie on her porch, and everywhere. And she has enough potatoes."

miércoles, diciembre 25, 2013

"I sleep well. It's the politicians who are to blame for failing to come to an agreement and resorting to violence," he said in 2007.

Kalashnikov died in a hospital in Izhevsk, the capital of the Udmurtia republic where he lived, said Viktor Chulkov, a spokesman for the republic's president. He did not give a cause of death. Kalashnikov had been hospitalized for the past month with unspecified health problems.

The AK-47 — "Avtomat Kalashnikov" and the year it went into production — is the world's most popular firearm, favored by guerrillas, terrorists and the soldiers of many armies. An estimated 100 million guns are spread worldwide.

Though it isn't especially accurate, its ruggedness and simplicity are exemplary: it performs in sandy or wet conditions that jam more sophisticated weapons such as the U.S. M-16.

"During the Vietnam war, American soldiers would throw away their M-16s to grab AK-47s and bullets for it from dead Vietnamese soldiers," Kalashnikov said in July 2007 at a ceremony marking the rifle's 60th anniversary.

The weapon's suitability for jungle and desert fighting made it nearly ideal for the Third World insurgents backed by the Soviet Union, and Moscow not only distributed the AK-47 widely but also licensed its production in some 30 other countries.

The gun's status among revolutionaries and national-liberation struggles is enshrined on the flag of Mozambique.

Kalashnikov, born into a peasant family in Siberia, began his working life as a railroad clerk. After he joined the Red Army in 1938, he began to show mechanical flair by inventing several modifications for Soviet tanks.

The moment that firmly set his course was in the 1941 battle of Bryansk against Nazi forces, when a shell hit his tank. Recovering from wounds in the hospital, Kalashnikov brooded about the superior automatic rifles he'd seen the Nazis deploy; his rough ideas and revisions bore fruit five years later.

"Blame the Nazi Germans for making me become a gun designer," said Kalashnikov. "I always wanted to construct agricultural machinery."

In 2007, President Vladimir Putin praised him, saying "The Kalashnikov rifle is a symbol of the creative genius of our people."

Over his career, he was decorated with numerous honors, including the Hero of Socialist Labor and Order of Lenin and Stalin Prize. But because his invention was never patented, he didn't get rich off royalties.

"At that time in our country patenting inventions wasn't an issue. We worked for Socialist society, for the good of the people, which I never regret," he once said.

Kalashnikov continued working into his late 80s as chief designer of the Izmash company that first built the AK-47. He also traveled the world helping Russia negotiate new arms deals, and he wrote books on his life, about arms and about youth education.

"After the collapse of the great and mighty Soviet Union so much crap has been imposed on us, especially on the younger generation," he said. "I wrote six books to help them find their way in life."

He said he was proud of his bronze bust installed in his native village of Kurya in the Siberian region of Altai. He said newlyweds bring flowers to the bust. "They whisper 'Uncle Misha, wish us happiness and healthy kids,'" he said. "What other gun designer can boast of that?"

Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47, died at age 94 Monday after a decorated career in the Russian military. His signature invention has been reproduced more than 100 million times since 2009, and is the world’s most popular firearm. Here are 10 things you should know about Mikhail Kalashnikov:

1. He aspired to be a poet. As a boy, Kalashnikov loved machinery but also had an affinity for poetry. He wrote poetry all his life, along with six books.

2. He once hitchhiked home to Russia. Kalashnikov was born in Kurya, Russia, but his family was deported to Siberia under the Stalin regime when he was a child. He left them to return to Kurya after the seventh grade, hitch-hiking nearly 1,000 kilometers, or more than 600 miles.

3. His son is also an arms dealer. Kalashnikov had four children with his engineer wife, Ekaterina Viktorovna Moiseyeva. Their youngest son, Victor, is a prominent small arms dealer who invented the PP-19 Bizon submachine gun.

4. He was injured in the military. Kalashnikov joined the military at 19 and served in the Russian tank division, where he invented improvements to the tanks. When he was injured by the Nazis in the Battle of Bryansk, he began working on weapons creation throughout his recovery.

5. The AK-47 is named after him. Kalashnikov’s signature invention, the AK-47 stands for “Avtomat Kalashnikov.” Avtomat is Russian for “automatic,” and 1947 was the year he invented it at age 28.

6. He has a line of vodka. Produced in St. Petersburg, Kalashnikov Vodka uses water from Lake Ladoga and is classified as a luxury export. It’s one degree stronger than regular vodka and sometimes called “military strength.”

7. He wasn’t motivated by money. Kalashnikov often said money wasn’t important to him but that he was motivated by service to his country. He was driven to design his first rifle by early Russian defeats in WWII to better-armed Germans. “I don’t like luxury,” he said. “I am after a simple decent life.”

8. He was a hunter. Kalashnikov took up hunting with his father to feed his family. He remained an avid hunter for the rest of his life, including a yearly moose hunting trip up into his 90s.

9. He had a big family. Kalashnikov was the 17th of 19 children born to his peasant parents. Only eight children survived to adulthood, and at age 6, Kalashnikov nearly died of illness himself.

10. He regretted terrorists getting hold of his inventions. At 82, Kalashnikov said he was proud of his invention, but that if he had it to do over again, he would invent something less destructive. “I would prefer to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work — for example, a lawnmower,” he said. However, asked how he felt about sleeping knowing that many had died from his work, he answered: “‘I sleep very well, thank you.”

miércoles, marzo 06, 2013

Soviet war veteran Bakhretdin Khakimov went missing in action 33
years ago, but has now been found living under the name Sheikh Abdullah
and working as a healer. Alexander Lawrentjew / dpa via AP

By Reuters

MOSCOW — A Soviet war veteran reported missing in action during fighting in Afghanistan 33 years ago has been found living as a local healer in the province of Herat, news agency Ria reported.

The soldier, who was rescued by Afghans after being wounded in the first months after the Soviet Union's invasion in 1979, was tracked down by a Moscow-based group of war veterans.

A native of the former Soviet Central Asian state of Uzbekistan, he now goes by the name of Sheikh Abdullah and has adopted the local dress and profession of the healer who nursed him back to health.

The deputy head of the Afghan war veterans' committee said Abdullah, whose given name is Bakhretdin Khakimov, mostly had forgotten the Russian language and never tried to contact his relatives after suffering severe head trauma in the fighting.

Alexander Lavrentyev, who met with Abdullah in Herat last month, said the veteran, who was 20 when he went missing, still bore the scars of his injury. His face is creased by a nervous tic and his hand and shoulder shake.

"He was just happy he survived,'' Lavrentyev was quoted by Ria as saying at a presser in Moscow on Monday.

The committee says it has found 29 of 264 soldiers still listed as missing from the bloody decade-long conflict. It said seven of those it contacted chose to stay in Afghanistan.

Some 15,000 Soviet troops were killed in the fighting that followed the Soviet Union's incursion to support a communist vassal government in Kabul against Islamist mujahideen fighters armed by the United States.

lunes, diciembre 31, 2012

Yesterday, on Sunday, December 30, Vladimir Bukovsky – writer, scientist, human rights campaigner, and one of the founders of the dissident movement in the USSR – celebrated his 70th birthday. IMR Senior Policy Advisor Vladimir Kara-Murza recalls the milestones in Bukovsky’s life – and urges the present-day Russian opposition to heed his advice.

Vladimir Bukovsky does not like to be called a politician, preferring to be known as a neurophysiologist, writer or, at the very least, civic activist. In truth, he never engaged in politics: he merely realized, at an early age, that he could not reconcile himself to live quietly with a criminal and mendacious regime that sought to make millions of people its silent accomplices. Bukovsky’s protest was a moral one. “We did not play politics, we did not draft programs for the ‘people’s liberation,’” he recalls in his memoirs, To Build a Castle (a must-read for anyone interested in Russian history). “Our only weapon was glasnost (openness). Not propaganda, but glasnost, so that no one could say ‘I did not know.’ The rest is a matter for each person’s conscience.”

“I did not know” was a popular answer among members of the older generation when asked by the youngsters of the 1950s about Stalin’s times. The public condemnation of Stalinist crimes at the 1956 Communist Party congress and (almost immediately) the brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolution, which showed that the nature of the regime has not changed, were formative events for Bukovsky. His protest activity began literally during his school days: he joined a clandestine anti-Soviet group and published an underground satirical journal. In response, he was expelled from school, summoned to a dressing-down by the Moscow City Communist Party Committee, and barred from studying at university (he nevertheless won admission to Moscow State University, only to be discovered and expelled a year later.)

Vladimir Bukovsky is one of the founders of the Soviet dissident movement, which was born in the fall of 1960 on Moscow’s Mayakovsky Square. There, a group of yet-unknown young activists, poets, and actors (including Yuri Galanskov, Eduard Kuznetsov, Vladimir Osipov, Ilya Bokshtein, and Vsevolod Abdulov) held public readings of banned poetry – Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelshtam, Tsvetaeva. They also read from their own works and the works of their contemporaries, which would soon be disseminated as samizdat (literally “self-publications,” the clandestine reproduction and distribution of banned literature). Samizdat, too, was born on Mayakovsky Square. The authorities responded in their usual manner: with dispersals of the meetings by bulldozers and snow ploughs; provocations by Komsomol (Young Communist League) operatives; beatings and arrests. Yet the “seditious” meetings continued in the heart of the Soviet capital for almost two years:

“That amazing community, which would later be called a ‘movement’, was being born. It had no leaders or followers…. Each of us, like a nerve cell, participated in this amazing orchestra without a conductor, compelled only by his or her sense of self-respect and personal responsibility for what was happening.” (Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle)

Vladimir Bukovsky was one of the organizers of the unofficial poetry readings on Moscow’s Mayakovsky Square, the birthplace of the Soviet dissident movement.

The Mayakovsky readings were only the beginning: one can study the history of dissent in the Soviet Union by reading Bukovsky’s biography. He was involved in organizing the December 1965 “Glasnost Rally” on Pushkin Square (Moscow’s first opposition demonstration in four decades); the January 1967 rally against political arrests (also on Pushkin Square;) and, probably his most important endeavor, the public campaign against “punitive psychiatry” used by the KGB against dissenters. After his first arrest in 1963 for “possession of anti-Soviet literature,” Bukovsky (then 20 years old) was brought to the office of Lieutenant-General Mikhail Svetlichny, the head of the Moscow KGB. “Svetlichny said a very simple thing,” Bukovsky recalls in the documentary They Chose Freedom. “‘Here is the arrest warrant. If you honestly tell us everything – where you got this book, who gave it to you, to whom you gave it [to read], I will not sign it, and you will go home. If you refuse, I will sign it, and you will go to jail.’ … I found such a formulation insulting, and cursed at him. He did not say anything, just shook his head, signed the warrant, and said ‘Take him away.’”

Vladimir Bukovsky paid for his refusal to go along with the regime’s lies with 12 years in prisons, labor camps, and “special psychiatric hospitals.” Not once did he admit his guilt, ask for clemency, disown his words, or betray his friends. “We fought desperately against this regime of scoundrels. We were a handful of unarmed people in the face of a mighty state with the world’s most monstrous machine of repression. And we won. The regime had to retreat. And even in prisons we proved too dangerous for them.” (Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle) On December 18, 1976, a handcuffed Bukovsky was driven to Chkalovsky military airfield and, accompanied by a convoy from the KGB’s elite Alpha unit (that was its first operation), was flown to Zurich’s international airport. Communist Party Central Committee documents referred to this as “measures relating to the liberation of Comrade L. Corvalan1.” In the end, the regime was unable to defeat its enemy inside the country.

In the early 1990s, Vladimir Bukovsky and Member of Parliament Galina Starovoitova tried to convince the Russian leadership to conduct a trial of the Communist regime and the KGB in order to help the country comprehend its past and avoid repeating it.

The next time Vladimir Bukovsky came to Russia was at the invitation of Boris Yeltsin in 1991, before the attempted August coup d’état – and again just after the coup, when barricades were still being dismantled near the Moscow White House, and when the empty pedestal from the toppled statue of KGB founder Felix Dzerzhinsky was still hand-painted with a swastika and hammer-and-sickle – with an equal sign between them. “Let us not flatter ourselves – the dragon is not yet dead. He is mortally wounded, his spine is broken, but he still holds human souls in his clinging paws,” Bukovsky said at a rally on Mayakovsky Square in September 1991. “The Lubyanka [KGB] archives, seized by the Russian government, contain secrets of dreadful crimes. Only by making them public, by handing them over to an objective international commission, will we be able to cleanse ourselves from this filth.” Unfortunately, Bukovsky’s call was not heeded. The new Russian authorities, unwilling to “rock the boat,” refrained from fully opening the archives, from officially condemning the Communist Party and the KGB for their crimes, and from introducing lustrations for those who had participated in the crimes. A genuine moral renewal of society never took place. Russia’s young democracy was not protected from a comeback by the ideological successors of Yuri Andropov and Vladimir Kryuchkov. This comeback came just eight years after the democratic victory of August 1991. As Bukovsky had warned, “it is like dealing with a wounded beast – if you do not finish it off, it will attack you.”

Today, Bukovsky is not retiring or leaving public life – and his upcoming 70th birthday will do nothing to change that. His experience in fighting the KGB system is too relevant; his advice too valuable; his standing among the leaders and supporters of the present-day Russian opposition too high. During the frozen (in all senses of the word) winter of 2007, at the height of Putin’s power, Bukovsky was nominated for president by the democratic opposition as a symbol of moral protest. The line of people wishing to sign his nomination papers extended for seven hours; the Sakharov Center could not accommodate everyone, and people had to wait outside in Moscow’s freezing temperatures.

In December 2007, Vladimir Bukovsky (center) was officially nominated for president of Russia by an assembly of voters in Moscow. The Central Electoral Commission headed by Vladimir Churov denied him access to the ballot.

“The opposition needs a candidate for president – strong, uncompromising, decisive, with irreproachable political and, more importantly, moral authority,” read the statement of the Initiative Group that nominated Bukovsky, “Russia needs its own Vaclav Havel, not a new successor from [the KGB].”

1 Vladimir Bukovsky was exchanged for Chilean Communist Party leader Luis Corvalan, who had been jailed by General Augusto Pinochet.

There are few people like Vladimir Bukovsky in any society – let alone Russian society, which has been wrecked by decades of Soviet dictatorship, and by 13 years of Putin’s cynical authoritarianism. It is likely that the coming years will bring significant changes to Russia. During this critical period, Bukovsky’s words will be very important. This time, they must be heard.

"You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother" - Albert Einstein

"It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office" - H. L. Menken

"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented" -Elie Wiesel

"Stay hungry, stay foolish" - Steve Jobs

"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert , in five years ther'ed be a shortage of sand" - Milton Friedman

"The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less" - Vaclav Havel